Why is Barbra Streisand holding America hostage to her personal therapy? That's the question you'll ask after witnessing "The Mirror Has Two Faces," a silly affirmation fantasy, opening today at Bay Area theaters, that Streisand directed, stars in and uses to prove she's really beautiful, funny and worthy of being loved, gosh darn it.

Streisand playing an ugly duckling- turned-swan -- again? Didn't she start her movie career this way, in "Funny Girl," and hasn't she returned to the theme of Homely Girl Redeemed, and crowned herself the victor, countless times? Look back and you'll see that Streisand's career, from the beginning, was one long battle cry for geeks and wallflowers and Jewish girls with big noses -- a series of wish-fulfillment scenarios in which she, the perennial underdog, triumphs by dint of talent, chutzpah and a really great personality.

That's fine when you're clunky, 19 years old and still wearing Flatbush glad rags. But Streisand is 54 years old now, immensely rich and accomplished, attractive in a distinctive way and hardly a can Jeff Bridges and Barbra Streisand co-star in 'The Mirror Has Two Faces,' directed by Streisand didate for sympathy.

That doesn't stop her from raising the Love-Me banner once again. Looking frankly fab, Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a brainy Romantic Literature professor at Columbia University. A hit with her students but a flop at relationships, she lives with her mother (Lauren Bacall), resents her foxy younger sister (Mimi Rogers) and harbors a secret crush on her dreamy brother-in-law (Pierce Brosnan).

Meanwhile, Streisand's fellow Columbia prof, a burned-by-love math nerd played by Jeff Bridges, is advertising for a nonsexual companion "interested in common goals." Rogers submits her sister's photo, Streisand dates him and they click. Although believing that romance is best left to youth, movies and paperback novels with embossed type on the cover, Streisand convinces herself that the unconventional union will work.

DELIGHTFUL FIRST HALF

In its first half "The Mirror" is a romantic-comic delight: nicely directed by Streisand, well-acted by a terrific cast and peppered with great one-liners by screenwriter Richard LaGravenese ("The Fisher King," "The Ref"). The performers are all strong, especially Rogers as the witchy sister and Bacall as the vinegary, once-beautiful mother -- and they collectively suggest that Streisand, as she proved in "Yentl" and "The Prince of Tides," has a gift for drawing out the best in her actors.

By the second half of "The Mirror," however, when Streisand's Rose undergoes a beauty- and-fitness makeover and proves to us and herself that she's not only desirable but a whole lot smarter than all of the world's Barbies and Kens, the movie has disintegrated into a humorless, drawn-out plea for reassurance.

After Rose has buffed and dieted and donned a low-cut dress, sexy high heels and a new 'do, everyone in the film flips over the reconditioned model. Her male students gaze in slack- jawed wonder, and Brosnan, the man who always ignored her, suddenly wants her.

In a tacky payback gesture, Rose seduces him -- remember, this is her sister's husband -- and then dumps him in the middle of a romantic clinch, happy to rub his face in his shallowness. Onscreen, whatever Barbra wants, she gets; in "The Prince of Tides," she played a psychiatrist so irresistible (and so unethical) that her client Nick Nolte couldn't resist jumping into bed with her.

Streisand's vanity is so unchecked that, even though the picture is supposed to be a before-and-after portrait -- frumpy broad blossoms into middle-aged Cinderella -- she insists on looking terrific even as the pre-makeover Rose. Great outfits, lighting that flatters and adores, skin like buttah.

It's impossible to watch "The Mirror Has Two Faces" and not project what we know about Streisand's life, which is a lot, onto the Second-Hand Rose she plays. We know Streisand suffered a lonely childhood, a cold stepfather and a mother who stomped on her self-esteem (Bacall does the same in the movie). And we know she grew up thinking she was ugly.

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Still, you wonder why, at 54, she's still playing a "sexy girl," as Bridges calls her in the movie, still hashing out her family issues and still casting herself against unavailable WASP dreamboats -- think Redford, Ryan O'Neal and Nolte -- in order to feel better about herself.

Isn't therapy cheaper?

ACCEPTING AGE

Streisand isn't the only actress in her 50s who has trouble accepting her age -- she's just the most visible. It's amazing to realize she's the same age Bette Davis was when Davis played that wrinkled harridan in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

Davis, God love her, knew that vanity was an actress' enemy after a certain age, and she had the guts to play venal, unattractive, complex women -- and not to use her career as an advertisement for her idealized virtues.